The immediate payment system of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia surpasses 1.7 billion transactions and COP 262 trillion in its first year. With 36 million users, equivalent to 67% of the population, the central bank has already identified four challenges for the next stage.
The immediate payment system Bre-B, driven by the Bank of the Republic of Colombia, has completed its first year of operation with figures that exceed the initial projections of the issuer. According to data reported by the central bank itself, the platform has processed more than 1.7 billion transactions worth over COP 262 trillion and now connects more than 36 million users, 67% of the Colombian population, according to figures from the integration ecosystem Mono collected by ecosistemastartup.com.
The average ticket per transaction stands at COP 147,249 and 62% of transactions are for less than COP 50,000, indicating that Bre-B has settled into the everyday use of individuals and small businesses, rather than in high-value corporate operations. In twelve months, the number of participating entities has increased from nearly 25 to 245, including banks, wallets, cooperatives, and six payment systems, with more than 172 cooperatives integrated that have brought modern payment services to rural areas and intermediate cities.
The model of collective construction, which the central bank began designing over six years ago and consolidated since 2022 with the financial and payment industry, has earned Colombia two international recognitions in 2026: a Central Banking Award in the category Payments and Market Infrastructure Development – Retail and a Silver Stevie at the International Business Awards, as reported by the Bank of the Republic.
“In just one year, Bre-B has gone from being a new way to make payments to becoming part of the daily lives of millions of Colombians,” stated Leonardo Villar, manager of the Bank of the Republic.
The issuer has outlined four fronts for the second stage, as explained by Ana María Prieto, director of the Payment Systems Department. The first is to deepen interoperability: although it was the basis for the launch, today 6 out of 10 registered keys (out of 116 million) have never received a payment, according to official figures from October. The second is to strengthen operational resilience, as with more than a million daily transactions, a system failure would have a much greater systemic impact than a year ago.
The third challenge is to promote scalability and new use cases. The 62% of operations below COP 50,000 confirms retail use, but shows that the higher value business segment has not yet migrated en masse. The fourth is to enable innovation on common standards: the Bank has published a regulatory proposal for comments that allows innovation in immediate payments above the current cap set at 1,000 UVB. This proposal specifies that innovation will be allowed in business payments that exceed the maximum amount currently permitted, opening the door to new use cases in B2B, mass collection, treasury, and payroll distribution.
The trajectory of Bre-B is compared to PIX, the immediate payment system of the Central Bank of Brazil launched in November 2020. After six years, PIX processes more than half of the transactions in the country by volume, has 170 million users (about 80% of the population), and its central bank has already signed information exchange agreements with 65 international counterparts, according to Reuters. In its first twelve months, PIX reached 62.4% of the Brazilian adult population with 348 million registered keys; Bre-B, in the same period, reached 67% of Colombians with 115.4 million keys.
The main difference lies in the corporate segment: by the end of 2026, PIX has over 16 million companies with active keys and processes nearly 80 billion transactions annually, with an increasing focus on P2B and B2B. Juan Camilo Poveda, CEO of Mono, summed it up: “The true potential of immediate payment systems lies in their ability to integrate into the operations of companies and not just remain an alternative for transferring money. That’s what we saw with PIX in Brazil and it’s the path that Colombia is beginning to take with Bre-B.” Mono projects to process more than 20 million business transactions through the Bre-B infrastructure during 2027, at an average rate of 40 operations per minute.
The global context of public payments is also on Washington's radar, although the available information does not detail concrete actions.
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